


a brand new soul and a cross of gold

by evewithanapple



Category: The Exorcist (TV)
Genre: F/F, Gen, LLF Comment Project
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-27 21:52:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13257354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evewithanapple/pseuds/evewithanapple
Summary: Kat and Casey start to rebuild their lives in Guelph. It goes in fits and starts.





	a brand new soul and a cross of gold

Kat’s body doesn’t obey her anymore, and that’s somehow the hardest part. She’s tough; there’s a lot she can deal with. The gaps in her dad’s memory, her mom’s long silences, the days Casey spends in her room behind a locked door - she can always respond to those with several deep breaths and a distraction. But then her knee gives out under her, or her leg won’t bend the way she wants it to, and she has to restrain herself from punching a wall.

Deep down, she knows, it’s about control. She’s a big girl; she understands that the way her family processes their varied traumas aren’t something she can dictate. That’s a part of reality she can accept. But her whole life, whenever things were sad or stressful or infuriating, she could always retreat to the studio and dance her feelings out. All the way back to primary school, when her ballet teacher would make them pirouette across the room over and over again, or stomp around chanting “ _flex_ and _pointe_ and _flex_ and _pointe_ ” over and over, there was some kind of primal satisfaction in bending her muscles and bones to her will. It may have burned and stretched, but at the end of the day, _she_ was the one who decided how to move. How to bend and sway and speak without speaking; how to tell people what she needed to get out but couldn’t properly put into words. Dance was her outlet, her language, her _life_. And now it’s just - gone.

There aren’t really any professional dance studios in Guelph, but she has managed to find a physical therapist - one who’s worked with injured dancers before, even. It’s hard to work with him, though, when she can’t really explain what lead to the injuries that ended her career in the first place.

- _How did you hurt your knee?_

- _Well, Doctor, my mother was possessed by a demon and trying to kill my dad, so I smashed my knee with a hammer to make her stop._

- _And your leg?_

- _Oh, that happened when I was driving and had just found out that my best friend who I was in love with was also in love with me, and then a demon - the same demon - stepped out into the road in front of me and made us crash._

Yeah. Not happening.

“Maybe you should talk to a priest,” Casey suggests, but Kat shrugs that idea off. Priests can help Casey and her mother, because God had a hand in what happened to them in the first place. Kat? Kat was only peripherally involved. Collateral damage. What would she even have to say to a priest? “Why does God let bad things happen to good people?”

She prefers the physical therapist, thanks.

* * *

 

Casey _does_ have an actual priest helping her out - well, a priest-cum-therapist. Kat’s not entirely sure what his qualifications are, but Casey seems to like him, so she doesn’t push. He’d  arrived on their doorstep a few weeks after they moved in, a tray of coffee in one hand and a slightly apologetic smile on his face. “I’m Father McGuinn,” he’d said. “Some - ah - mutual friends sent me. May I come in?”

She kind of resented him for that. Why not just come out and say that Father Tomas and Father Marcus sent him their way? Hadn’t they all had enough of hidden histories and half-truths? But whenever those thoughts come creeping into her throat, she looks at her sister and swallows them back down. This is not her trauma. It’s not her tragedy. She has no right.

“He’d talk to you, you know,” Casey tells her. They’re both spread out on Kat’s bed, as Kat balances her laptop on her knees. She’s watching makeup tutorials; she’s found them strangely soothing lately. “If you asked him. He’s not just here for me.”

Kat doesn’t take her eyes away from the screen. It’s churlish, but she’s still human. “Is that what he said?”

“Mmm.” Casey rolls onto her back, stretching both arms over her head. “He’s sat down with Mom a few times.”

“Mom’s different,” Kat says. On her screen, a makeup guru is weighing the pros and cons of Clinique versus Smashbox foundation. “Different from me, I mean." 

Casey pauses, both arms still extended. She’s fixing Kat with a searching, searing look that makes her uncomfortable. “Because of the demon, you mean?”

“Always match your primer to your foundation,” says the woman on Kat’s screen. Kat drums her fingers against the edge of her laptop. “I didn’t say that.”

“But you were thinking it.” When Kat doesn’t respond, Casey reaches out and flicks her on the arm. “Hey. You got hurt too, you know.”

Kat flinches away. “I don’t want to talk about it.” When Casey keeps looking at her, she sighs and shuts the cover of her laptop. “Why are we even having this conversation? Are _you_ seriously telling _me_ I should feel crappy?”

Casey looks a little hurt. “I don’t want you to feel crappy."

“No.” Kat rubs at her eyes. “No, I know you don’t.” She hates being like this. She hates the feeling of reverting into the person she was a year ago - a snarling, wounded animal backed into a corner and trying to bite anyone who reached out to help her. She’s not that person anymore. She doesn’t _want_ to be that person anymore. “Enough talking about me, okay? Let’s talk about you. How are your classes going?”

“Ughhhh,” Casey says. She tips her head back against the wall with an exaggerated roll of her eyes. “I keep getting dinged for using American spelling. It’s the worst.”

“That’s bullshit,” Kat says. “What does it even matter? They can still understand what you mean.” Luckily for her, she hasn’t started taking any kind of classes yet - she had her high school diploma before they moved, so she doesn’t need to - which means she doesn’t have to deal with the weirdness of ending words with “re” instead of “er” and using metres instead of feet. She’s still adjusting to ordering “timbits” instead of doughnut holes. “Are there at least any . . . uh . . . cute guys in your class?”

Casey bursts out laughing, nudging Kat’s leg with her foot. “You sound _so_ weird when you talk about boys. Like an alien trying to learn how the hu-mans speak.”

Kat huffs and lobs a Beanie Baby at her. “Well ex- _cuuuuuuse_ me for trying.”

Casey catches the Beanie Baby - a little robin, the tag long since lost - and hugs it under her chin. She’s quiet for a few moments, then says, “I’m sorry for what I said at the memorial.”

“What you . . . ?” It honestly takes Kat a second to remember what she’s talking about; so much has happened between then and now. “It was months ago, Case. And besides, it wasn’t you.”

“It was,” Casey says quietly. “I mean - he told me to say it, but it was still _me_. I knew what I was doing, and I knew it was hurting you, and I did it anyway.” She examines the Beanie Baby, pressing its stuffed nose against hers’. “And it wasn’t true.”

Kat looks at her sharply. “What do you mean?”

Casey finally sets the Beanie Baby down. “What I said about her being the love of your life. That part wasn’t true.” She looks at Kat. “You can still love other people. You can date and fall in love and all of that stuff. Just because she was your first doesn’t mean she has to be your last.”

Kat sits with that for a long time. She thinks she’ll never really recapture what it was like with Julia - the delicate, fragile sensation of petals unfolding out towards the sun. Uncertain and faltering and shy, never quite sure of what the next step was. She doesn’t even know if she wants to feel that way again. She thinks it might be too painful, starting over from the beginning. But she also doesn’t want to resign herself to a life lived alone.

“Thanks,” she says finally.

Casey rolls over and throws her arm across Kat in a hug. Kat hugs her back. “Any time.”

 

* * *

 

One thing Kat’s found she can still do these days is swim. It wasn’t something that appealed to her much back in Chicago - back then, her calendar had been full of rehearsals anyway, and besides, what was the point of flopping around in the water? But now, the brute force of it is kind of what she needs. When she kicks off the wall of the pool and sets out for the other end, legs and arms slapping the surface, the stink of chlorine in her nose, it wipes out any other thought or sensation. Her muscles still ache, but in that good way that she missed from hours of dance. It does strike her as somewhat ironic that she’s come around to swimming here, in a country so cold that her hair develops little frost crystals if she walks out to the car without blow drying first. But the cold makes her happy, too: when the wind whips in her face and numbs her skin, it gives her something else to fight against. You think you can freeze me into submission, Canada? You’ve got another think coming.

The pool she swims at is at the local YMCA, which costs her about fourty dollars a month. Her parents could spot her the money, but she feels bad asking, so she gets a part-time job at the local froyo place instead. A job is also a novelty for her: back in Chicago, no one wanted to take on a part-time employee whose calendar was always filled end to end with practices and performances. Now, with far more time on her hands, she’s slowly discovering the life of a normal twentysomething. It’s weird, and there are parts she’s not sure she likes (some of the customers are The Worst) but it’s certainly an eye-opener.

She even starts making friends among her co-workers. “Ugh, you reek of pool water,” one of them complains as she tosses an apron at Kat, but she’s smiling when she says it.

“It’s chlorine, bitch,” Kat shoots back, smiling too. “Kills germs.”

Her co-worker, Bree, snorts. “Not enough chlorine in the world to make up for all the kids peeing in that pool.”

Kat throws a stack of napkins at her. “Whatever. Go mop up the kid pee in the bathroom.”

Bree has a circle of friends from the local university - she’s there part-time, studying environmental science - and they take to inviting Kat out with them on days when she’s not working. There’s Jamie with the tongue stud; Alanna who never seems to take off her University of Guelph hoodie; Izzy with her three-inch thick lenses and perpetually overflowing backpack. They take her to Sadie’s Kitchen for brunch, pass around bags of organic muffins, and tell jokes about professors Kat’s never met. As with everything else, it’s an adjustment. She didn’t really have a social life like this before, especially not with people she doesn’t share a driving passion with. Mostly, she sits quietly and listens. Sometimes she drops in questions about their favourite classes, and makes little mental notes for the future.

“Wendy!” Alanna shouts across the bar one night. She waves both hands over her head, the cuffs of her sleeves sliding down almost to her elbows. “Come over here!”

Kat squints at the figure slowly making her way across the bar. She’s familiar, vaguely, but Kat can’t quite pin down where she’s seen her before. She’s Asian, with black hair just barely long enough to be held in a ponytail and a denim jacket with metal studs across the shoulders. If Kat’s found one Canadian stereotype to be true, it’s that they definitely love their denim. She jumps a bit when Wendy extends a hand towards her. “Wendy Nguyen. I don’t think we’ve met . . . ?”

Kat takes her hand and shakes it. “Kat Rance,” she says, feeling the slight prickle of apprehension that comes on whenever she introduces herself. But there’s no corresponding flicker of recognition on Wendy’s face, and Kat lets herself relax. “Are you a student?"

“Nah.” Wendy hitches herself up on the stool next to Kat’s. “I did a three-year and graduated this past summer. Kinesiology I’ve got a stroke rehab gig now.”

And now Kat remembers where she’s seen Wendy before - walking the halls of the athletic center where she swims. She’d never really paid her that much attention, too wrapped up in her own thoughts. “Stroke rehab . . . ?”

“Helping people get their muscle function back after they’re released from hospital,” Wendy explains, tucking a loose piece of hair behind her ear. A little rainbow stud in her earlobe glitters in the dim light of the bar. “It’s pretty decent work. Frustrating sometimes, but worth it. I want to find a massage therapist position one of these days, but no one seems to be hiring.”

 _Come get me, baby we're not getting younger_ , the stereo wails. Kat’s not entirely sure what makes her take the plunge, but she does. She leans forward, letting the shoulder strap of her tank top slide down. “You like doing things hands-on?”

Wendy reaches past her, grinning, and swipes Kat’s drink, downing half of it in one swallow before Kat can protest. “Sure do.”

There’s an honest-to-god disco ball strung up overhead, strobing lights reflecting off it in time to the pulsing beat of the music. Kat can feel the rumbling deep down in her bones. She doesn’t even think about another song, on a quieter night. _Becoming a specter of what you used to dream._ “Tell me about it.”

 

* * *

 

“Kat?” Casey’s standing in the doorway. “Can I talk to you?”

Kat looks up. This time, she’s reading a book rather than watching YouTube; Emma Donoghue’s _Frog Music_. Wendy recommended it. “Sure.” She pats the bed next to her. “Come on in.”

Casey does, lowering herself down to the mattress and rolling over so that she’s facedown on the pillows. Kat sets her book aside on the nightstand and waits for her sister to speak. The only noise is the gentle buzz of the fan overhead.

Finally, Casey speaks, muffled by the pillow. Kat has to strain to hear her properly. “How long after you start dating someone do you have to have sex?”

Kat feels her stomach drop out from under her. “You don’t _have_ to have sex with anyone, Case.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Casey turns her head sideways so that her face is no longer hidden, but her eyes are squeezed shut. “How long before you’re - supposed to? Normally? Like . . . most people.”

“I don’t know.” Kat wants to rest a hand on Casey’s back, but also thinks maybe she shouldn’t touch her sister just now. Part of her wishes Casey had taken this question to their mom, but another part is glad she didn’t. Mom and Casey have a special bond now, but she’s still . . . _Mom_. They never took their sex questions to Mom before. That was why they had Google.

But Casey hadn’t turned to Google for this one, either. “I think it’s three dates,” she says. She brings her thumb up to her mouth and tugs the nail between her teeth. “I think I remember reading that somewhere. Cosmo, maybe?”

Kat curls her fingers into the duvet to keep herself from reaching out and pulling Casey’s hand away from her mouth. “I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule about it.” She waits a beat, then asks, “why do you want to know?”

“I . . .” Casey rolls over onto her back, fingers digging hard into her hair, against her scalp. “I met a guy. At the coffee shop. His name’s Graham, and he’s - he’s nice, you know? Not just Canadian nice, but really nice.” She takes a deep breath. “We went to see a movie last week. It was stupid, I don’t even remember what it was about. And we . . . we held hands for some of it.” She groans. “I sound like I’m still in middle school.”

“You don’t,” Kat says quietly. “Then what?”

“He texted me earlier.” Casey turns her head on the pillow to look at Kat. “He wants to go out again. And, I mean - I think I want to. I think I like him. And he’s cute. But I don’t - I just -” She squeezes her eyes shut again. “I don’t know.”

Kat wishes she could think of some wise, older-sisterly advice to offer Casey. But she hasn’t got anything. How can she? Sure, she’s made out a few times, at parties, before it clicked that guys weren’t really her thing. And she’d gone on a few dates, too - but never too many in a row, and never with any conclusion beyond a chaste kiss before getting out of the car. And there’s Wendy, and they’ve done . . . some stuff, but the rules are different there. Somehow. She can’t really explain why, but they are.

Casey rubs at the corner of her eye, where her scar is. It’s faded - almost impossible to see, really - but you _can_ see it, if you look hard enough. Finally, Kat catches at Casey’s wrist and pulls it away. “You don’t have to,” she says again, firmly. “You can take as long as you need. If he asks, tell him - tell him you’ve been through some stuff and want to take it slow. Tell him it’s a medical thing. Tell him whatever. It doesn’t matter. But don’t-” She swallows. “Don’t do anything, if you don’t want to.”

Casey rolls over again, this time so that she’s nestled against Kat’s side, her head resting on her sister’s shoulder. When she presses her face to the hollow of Kat’s neck, her face is damp. “I do want to,” she mumbles. “But I - I don’t, at the same time.” She tucks her face in closer against Kat’s neck, and her next words are almost inaudible. “I don’t want anyone . . . _inside me_ . . . ever again.”

Kat’s book falls off the bed and onto the floor with a dull thump as Kat reaches over to put both arms around her sister. “It’s okay,” she says, again and again. “Whatever you want. Whatever you need. It’s okay.” It’s all the advice she has. She hopes it’s enough. 

* * *

 

 

She tells Wendy a month after they’ve started dating. It’s early morning, before the sun comes up: they’d gotten home late the previous night, and crashed together into Wendy’s bed in a fog of sangria and giggly exhaustion. Kat had woken early this morning, before Wendy, and managed to stumble to the bathroom without waking her up. On her way back, she’d paused in the hallway: it was lined with family photos. No dad in sight, but an older woman who looks almost exactly like Wendy, and another woman in between - maybe the older sister Wendy’s mentioned from time to time, who moved up to Nunavut to work in a medical clinic. They all had their arms around each other, grinning widely. It looked not unlike the photos Kat’s family had at home, though the majority of those were still packed away in boxes. No one really talked about it, but it was easier that way: to just not have any visual reminders of the past at all. They also hadn’t mentioned the secondhand family photos Mom had passed off as being of her early years, though Kat had gone online and found a few publicity shots of her grandmother. She hasn’t printed any of them out, but she keeps copies on her phone and looks at them from time to time. Grandma looked like Casey when she was young. She’s thought about telling Casey that from time to time, but as with all things related to their family history, it seems better to stay quiet.

When she gets back to the bedroom, Wendy’s half-awake, and she rolls over and throws an arm around Kat as she climbs into bed. “Morning,” she mumbles, voice still fuzzy with sleep. “Find the bathroom okay?”

“Yeah.” Kat turns her head so it’s resting on Wendy’s shoulder. “I was looking at the photos out in the hall. That’s your mom and sister?”

“Yep,” Wendy says with a yawn, “that’s Ruby. Almost all those photos are from when we went out to Alberta a few years ago. Mom and Rubes wanted to see the Stampede.”

Kat disentangles herself from Wendy long enough to reach over the side of the bed and fish her phone from out of her purse. She taps the ‘files’ button and pulls up her photo gallery. “That’s me and my sister,” she murmurs, “when we went to New York.” They’d seen _Wicked_ ; Casey’s idea. Kat had lobbied for _Chicago_ , but her mother and sister had outvoted her, and Dad had sat out the whole discussion. She thumbs over to the next photo. “And that’s my grandmother. My mom’s mom.”

Wendy peers at the photo and whistles. “Is it weird if I say your mom’s mom is kind of hot?”

“Was,” Kat says. “And she looks like my sister, so it’s _kind_ of weird.” She goes back to the picture of her and Casey standing in front of Strawberry Fields, arm in arm, grinning and squinting against the midday sun. They’d visited the Dakota that day, too. Had Grandma ever been there? Had Grandma watched _Rosemary_ _’s Baby_? Had it come to mind during that year in Georgetown?

“Eh, I don’t see it,” Wendy says. “She does look kind of familiar, though. Was she an actress?”

Kat takes a deep breath and sets the phone down on the floor. “Yeah,” she says. “Chris MacNeil. Have you ever heard of her?”

Wendy shakes her head, forehead creasing. “Not the name, I don’t think. Did she do movies?”

“Some,” Kat says, “in the seventies. There was this - this thing, with my mom . . .”

It comes out slowly, in bits and pieces. She knows her retelling is scattershot and disjointed, almost impossible to follow in a linear sense, if anyone was even optimistic enough to try. She jumps from name to name, date to date, like playing hopscotch with her memories of the past few years: “There were these priests - no, there was one priest at first, he was our parish priest, then he brought in this other one who wasn’t even really a priest, he was an exorcist, I don’t think it’s the same - and we have a new priest now, but it’s not either of them. I don’t know where they are now. I think they left Chicago too . . .”

Wendy listens without interruption, her head propped up on one hand, scanning Kat’s face with a smooth, composed look. She occasionally makes soft noises at especially shocking turns of the story - Kat hears a little bitten-off gasp when she brings up the ambulance - but otherwise lets Kat’s words unspool on their own, one hand resting lightly on Kat’s arm.

“. . . and then we ended up here,” Kat finished. “In Guelph.” She lets out a little, humourless chuckle. “I thought at first that people would recognize us, but no one did. Or if they did, they didn’t mention it. Canadian politeness, I guess.” She shifts a little under Wendy’s hand, looking away. “So . . .”

“So,” Wendy repeats. Kat looks back at her; her face is still impassive. Kat can’t tell what she’s thinking. “You had a pretty crazy year.”

“Pretty crazy couple of years,” Kat manages. Tears are pooling in the corners of her eyes, and she’s not sure why. Wendy’s thumb moves gently on her arm, rubbing back and forth. “So you . . . believe me . . . ?”

Wendy snorts softly. “If you were going to make something up, you’d probably make it less weird than that.”

Kat laughs, dropping her head onto Wendy’s shoulder. Wendy leans down and kisses her forehead. She feels something dark and heavy rising from her chest, like a newly-hatched bird, still sticky with blood and albumen. She snuggles in closer and tucks her head under Wendy’s chin as Wendy runs her fingers through Kat’s hair. Neither of them speak. Neither of them need to.

 

* * *

 

“So,” Casey deadpans, “how’s your sex life?”

Kat throws a pillow at her. “Ew. Don’t be gross.”

“ _I_ _’m_ gross?” Casey leans forward and snatches Kat’s phone from her hand, waving it just out of her reach. “You’re the one with a couples’ picture as your lockscreen. It’s so . . . _domestic_.” She wrinkles her nose. “Are you getting each other promise rings next?”

“Shut up,” Kat says, finally grabbing the phone back. It’s true, her lockscreen _is_ a picture of her and Wendy - they took it on a trip to the CNE over the summer, seated at the top of the Ferris Wheel, faces squished together into the frame. Over Kat’s shoulder, there’s a flash of bright blue - Lake Ontario in the background. “What about you, huh? When do we get to meet Graham?”

Casey turns bright pink, as Kat knew she would. “ _You_ shut up.”

“No, you.” Kat kicks one socked foot in Casey’s direction, almost connecting with her shin before Casey dodges. Her leg is improving: she can walk without a cane now, and stretch with only minor pain. Her knee still aches, mostly on rainy days, but she’s learning to push past it. “Turnabout’s fair play. I brought Wendy around to meet you guys months ago, so when’s your turn, huh?”

“You are such a pain in the ass,” is what Casey says in reply to that, pressing the heels of her hands against her forehead. “Soon, okay? He’s busy with his term paper right now. When he’s done, I’ll invite him over for dinner.”

“Good.” Kat props her chin up on her hands, watching Casey. “And everything’s . . . good with you two?”

Casey shoots her a dirty look. “Are you asking me about my sex life now?”

“Turnabout. Fair play.”

“Fine.” Casey flops backwards into her beanbag chair. “It’s fine. We’re not . . . going too far, too fast. He’s okay with that, and so am I.” She rolls her eyes. “I haven’t done anything I’d have to confess to Father McGuinn about, which is good. I do not want to have that conversation.”

Kat hums an agreement. She still hasn’t really spoken to Father McGuinn; despite Casey’s encouragement, she’s okay with closing a door on that part of her life. She’ll go back to confession someday, maybe. When she feels like it. Or when they elect the first gay Pope.

(Again, she thinks of Father Tomas and Father Marcus. Neither of them had even spoken to her about what the demon said about Julia, even though she knows they both heard it. Maybe it just wasn’t very high on their list of priorities at the time. Or at all. In a world where demons are real, she thinks, the Church should really learn to re-evaluate their list of sins. Maybe exorcism should take precedence over anti-gay adoption rallies.)

She does still have a little gold cross necklace, though - the charm is tiny, no longer than the nail on her index finger. She takes it out on special occasions, but otherwise, it stays in her jewelery box; she doesn’t want to lose it at the pool. She thinks she’ll wear it when Casey’s boyfriend comes to visit.

“So he’s good?” she asks. “You’re . . . good?”

“Yeah,” Casey says. When Kat looks at her, she’s smiling, an easy, carefree smile. “Yeah, we’re good. I’m good.” She pauses. “And how about us? We’re good too?”

Kat leans off the bed, extending her arm until she can reach Casey’s hand and link their pinky fingers together, like they used to do when they were kids. _Cross my heart and hope to die._ “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah. We’re good.”

**Author's Note:**

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